I still want to write, but in ways that are in some sense more intense, and auxiliary. Like I really enjoy writing my threads on maker projects where the writing is a supporting role not the main act.
Conversation
Same with storytelling. I enjoy it because it’s pre-communicative. Writing down a story feels like an auxiliary step to “making” it. And you could substitute drawing it animation or oral telling… stories precede the telling in some weird way.
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Relatedly, for the narrower role for writing I see all around, I’m vaguely attracted to poetry again after decades, since it’s a way to make words instruments of seeing rather than ends in themselves. Each word a microscope. 100x fewer words, each doing 100x more 🤔
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I’m sitting in a cafe doing some long overdue planning (planning is another textual activity I have lowered desire for) and trying to apply my “10 year commitment or no deal” rule to all my activities, and asking: do I want to commit to writing in the next decade at all?
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Good or bad news depending on whether or not you like my writing: I still want to write through the 2020s for sure. It’s far from the cutoff risk zone. And it’s still an important part of the portfolio. But no longer #1 activity. #2 at best.
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And when I do feel the writing itch as a primary thing, it’s more stuff that comes out looking like psyche-scanning automatic writing… more primal and way more rough. With no clearly executed rhetorical intent. Feels like prefab concrete blocks rather than finished structures.
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Wonder if there's cycles to these things. Periods when textuality is very high strategic leverage in the pragmatic wider world which leads to a lot of people building lives around producing it and tapping into various shallow and deep inner motivations for producing it.
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It's only in the downcycle that your true relationship to words and texts becomes clearer. When the world doesn't value it highly so it's IRR or nothing.
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I kinda feel bad for the people flooding in right now, especially young people with a deeper connection to words than me, and more talent for it, and in an environment where the tech for it has never been better. The bubble/looming trough is entirely cultural/political/economic.
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But hey, if you survive entering the world of words in a downmarket, you'll be a force to reckon with when you've sailed past your first few 100ks of words.
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I had the privilege of starting out in the middle of the longest bull run of word-equity in living memory, and enjoying 2 boom decades... enough to store up momentum and motivation to carry me through what I suspect will be at least a decade long slump
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I think it's specifically the essay that's in the most trouble. The tweet and the book are relatively crash proof.
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Wondering if there were other eras of text recession. The 1920s feel like a good candidate outside of lost gen literary types.
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I wrote this on Feb 24, 2020, like a week before personally going into lockdown/pandemic prepper mode, a few months after getting into Roam, and doing threadapalooza. Genuinely felt like a renaissance at the time.
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The pandemic and the associated sheer savagery of election-year extreme noble-lying around it is what has driven us into a bubble/looming recession situation. Left to itself, it would have taken 4-5 Golden Age years, esp if Trump had lost w/o pandemic. A stillborn renaissance.
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